Mockingbird

Content Warning: The final entry contains a graphic description of gunshot injuries.

A mission chest is an elaborately crafted piece of furniture that requires expert care and diligent commitment. It also implies community: Because of its massive size and its numerous drawers and shelves, it is designed to service a family. It encourages coming together—a repository for the accumulated stuff that defines any family.

As a symbol, Devon’s mission chest does just that—it becomes the instrument for bringing together Caitlin, her father, and ultimately the entire community. At the beginning of the novel, Devon’s father has covered his son’s unfinished Eagle Scout project under a bed sheet in the living room of Caitlin’s home. He claims he covers it to protect Caitlin, but Caitlin understands the bed sheet shields her father from accepting what happened and helps justify his retreat into isolation.

Caitlin’s insight—that the unfinished piece of furniture might lead to the closure that she intuits she and her father need—reveals the symbolic value of the chest. In convincing her father to help her complete Devon’s project, the three of them fuse into a single entity: Father, son, and daughter come together to finish the work. Caitlin recounts how carefully the two of them work on the chest to create something “good and strong and beautiful” from the materials Caitlin and her father secure from Lowe’s (163).